The Eichmann interrogations in Holocaust historiography

The 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem attracted international attention, and the minutes of his interrogations have been used widely as a documentary source. 'Intentionalists' have claimed they prove an early central order for the Holocaust; 'functionalists' have taken them as evidence for the bureaucratic and possibly nonideological character of perpetrators. Unfortunately, limitations on the value of the interrogations as a source render both approaches problematic. The following article reconsiders the significance of perpetrators' retrospective accounts by reconstructing Eichmann's strategies of legal defense and self-justification as a context for his numerous and varied autobiographical statements.